Shadows and Substance

Earthly pictures of heavenly realities

The New Testament repeatedly says that Old Testament institutions were pictures of something greater:

• “These are a shadow of the things to come, but the body that casts it belongs to Christ” (Colossians 2:17).
• The priests “serve… a copy and shadow of what is in heaven” (Hebrews 8:5).
• “These things happened to them as examples and were written down as warnings for us” (1 Corinthians 10:11).
• “God’s invisible qualities… have been clearly seen, being understood from His workmanship” (Romans 1:20).
• “The spiritual, however, was not first, but the natural, and then the spiritual” (1 Corinthians 15:46).

A shadow shows the outline of something real but isn’t the thing itself. Jesus taught the same way, using seeds, bread, water, sheep and wedding feasts. After His resurrection He showed the disciples how “Moses and all the Prophets” spoke of Him (Luke 24:27, 44).

Law, Sabbaths and foods

“Let no one judge you by what you eat or drink, or with regard to a feast, a New Moon, or a Sabbath. These are a shadow of the things to come, but the body that casts it belongs to Christ.” (Colossians 2:16–17)

“For the law is only a shadow of the good things to come, not the realities themselves. It can never, by the same sacrifices offered year after year, make perfect those who draw near to worship.” (Hebrews 10:1)

The law was good and from God, but it was a preview. Its sacrifices were repeated every year because they could not remove sin for good; Christ’s sacrifice was “once for all” (Hebrews 10:10–14).

The feasts of Israel

The seven feasts in Leviticus 23 line up remarkably with Christ’s work. The first four were fulfilled at His first coming, on the very days of the feasts; many see the last three as pointing to His return.

The Sabbath

The weekly rest pictures the rest found in Christ: “Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). “There remains, then, a Sabbath rest for the people of God. For whoever enters God’s rest also rests from his own work, just as God did from His” (Hebrews 4:9–10). It also points forward to the millennium (see below).

Clean and unclean foods

• The food laws taught Israel to be separate and holy (Leviticus 11:44–45).
• Jesus said what defiles comes from the heart, not food: “Thus all foods are clean” (Mark 7:18–23).
• Peter’s vision of unclean animals was really about people. God was opening the gospel to the Gentiles: “God has shown me that I should not call any man impure or unclean” (Acts 10:9–16, 28).

Other shadows

• Circumcision pictures a changed heart: “circumcision is a matter of the heart, by the Spirit” (Romans 2:29; Colossians 2:11).
• Animal sacrifices picture the one sacrifice of Christ: “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29).
• The priesthood pictures Christ our great High Priest (Hebrews 4:14), and believers as “a royal priesthood” (1 Peter 2:9).

Pain in childbirth and Jesus’s return

Pain in childbirth began with the fall: “I will sharply increase your pain in childbirth; in pain you will bring forth children” (Genesis 3:16). Scripture then uses labor pains as a picture of the end of the age.

• “Wail, for the Day of the LORD is near… Terror, pain, and anguish will seize them; they will writhe like a woman in labor” (Isaiah 13:6–8).
• “While people are saying, ‘Peace and security,’ destruction will come upon them suddenly, like labor pains on a pregnant woman, and they will not escape” (1 Thessalonians 5:3), right after the description of the Lord’s coming in 4:16–17.
• Jesus called the wars, famines and earthquakes before the end “the beginning of birth pains” (Matthew 24:8).
• “The whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until the present time” (Romans 8:22).

What the picture teaches

The curse that carries a promise

The same chapter that brings the pain also brings the promise: the woman’s offspring would crush the serpent’s head (Genesis 3:15). Revelation 12 pictures a woman “crying out in the pain and agony of giving birth” who gives birth to the male child who rules the nations, while the dragon tries to devour Him (12:1–5). Isaiah describes Zion giving birth suddenly, “a nation… delivered in an instant” (Isaiah 66:7–8), and Micah says Israel will be given up “until she who is in labor has given birth” (Micah 5:3). Pain in childbirth, a result of the fall, became the picture of how God brings in redemption.

The Sabbath and the millennium

“Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God… For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth and the sea and all that is in them, but on the seventh day He rested.” (Exodus 20:9–11)

“Beloved, do not let this one thing escape your notice: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.” (2 Peter 3:8)

Revelation 20:1–7 then describes a thousand-year reign of Christ, with Satan bound, the saints reigning, and the earth at rest. Putting the three together gives a well-known idea: a “week” of world history, six thousand years of human labor followed by a thousand-year Sabbath under Christ.

An ancient idea

• The Epistle of Barnabas, an early Christian writing from around AD 100–130, taught that “in six thousand years the Lord will bring all things to an end,” then rest on the seventh day when the Son returns.
• Irenaeus (about AD 180) taught the same pattern.
• The Jewish Talmud preserves a similar tradition: the world will exist six thousand years, the last two thousand being the days of the Messiah (Sanhedrin 97a).

Supporting pictures

• The land itself rested every seventh year, and every fiftieth year was the Jubilee, when slaves were freed and land returned to its owners (Leviticus 25), a picture of the restoration the kingdom brings.
• “There remains, then, a Sabbath rest for the people of God” (Hebrews 4:9).
• Jesus is “Lord of the Sabbath” (Matthew 12:8) and healed on the Sabbath, showing what His kingdom rest would be like (Luke 13:16).

Marriage

Marriage is perhaps the clearest earthly picture in the Bible. Paul quotes the first marriage and then explains what it was about all along:

“‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’ This mystery is profound, but I am speaking about Christ and the church.” (Ephesians 5:31–32)

Through the whole Bible

• God as Israel’s husband. “Your husband is your Maker—the LORD of Hosts is His name” (Isaiah 54:5). “I will betroth you to Me forever… in faithfulness” (Hosea 2:19–20). Unfaithfulness to God is called adultery (Jeremiah 3:8; James 4:4), as in the Adultery study.
• Jesus as the bridegroom. John the Baptist: “The bride belongs to the bridegroom” (John 3:29). Jesus: “How can the guests of the bridegroom mourn while He is with them?” (Matthew 9:15).
• The church betrothed. “I promised you to one husband, to present you as a pure virgin to Christ” (2 Corinthians 11:2).
• The wedding at the end. “The marriage of the Lamb has come, and His bride has made herself ready” (Revelation 19:7–9); the New Jerusalem comes down “prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (21:2, 9).

The pattern of a Jewish wedding

From His side

God formed Eve from Adam’s side while he slept (Genesis 2:21–22). On the cross, a soldier pierced Jesus’s side, “and immediately blood and water flowed out” (John 19:34). Many early Christians saw the church, the bride, born from the side of Christ, the last Adam (1 Corinthians 15:45).

Earthly marriage is temporary: “in the resurrection, people will neither marry nor be given in marriage” (Matthew 22:30). The picture is no longer needed once the reality arrives.

Slavery in Egypt and slavery to sin

Paul says the Exodus events “happened to them as examples and were written down as warnings for us” (1 Corinthians 10:1–11). The whole story pictures salvation.

Canaan still had giants and battles, so it pictures the victorious life of faith more than heaven itself. The generation that died in the wilderness is a warning: they were delivered from Egypt but “because of their unbelief… were unable to enter” (Hebrews 3:19). And Matthew applies “Out of Egypt I called My son” (Hosea 11:1) to Jesus, the true Israel, who walked the same path and succeeded where Israel failed (Matthew 2:15).

The Jerusalem temple and the New Jerusalem

“The place where they serve is a copy and shadow of what is in heaven. This is why Moses was warned when he was about to build the tabernacle: ‘See to it that you make everything according to the pattern shown you on the mountain.’” (Hebrews 8:5; Exodus 25:40)

The tabernacle, and later the temple, was built as a model of a heavenly original. Christ “did not enter a man-made copy of the true sanctuary, but He entered heaven itself” (Hebrews 9:24).

The tabernacle furniture

God’s dwelling place through Scripture

1. Eden, where God walked with man (Genesis 3:8), guarded on the east by cherubim (3:24), as later the tabernacle faced east and cherubim were woven into its veil.
2. The tabernacle: “They are to make a sanctuary for Me, so that I may dwell among them” (Exodus 25:8).
3. Solomon’s temple, filled with God’s glory (1 Kings 8:10–11).
4. Jesus’s body: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up again… Jesus was speaking about the temple of His body” (John 2:19–21).
5. The church: “you yourselves are God’s temple, and… God’s Spirit dwells in you” (1 Corinthians 3:16; Ephesians 2:21–22).
6. Each believer: “your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit” (1 Corinthians 6:19).
7. The New Jerusalem: “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man” (Revelation 21:3). “I saw no temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple” (21:22).

The city shaped like the Most Holy Place

The Most Holy Place in Solomon’s temple was a perfect cube, twenty cubits each way (1 Kings 6:20). The New Jerusalem is also a cube: “all its dimensions were equal… in length and width and height” (Revelation 21:16). The whole city becomes the Most Holy Place, where God’s people “will see His face” (22:4). Only the high priest could enter once a year; in the New Jerusalem everyone lives there.

Two Jerusalems

• “The present-day Jerusalem… is in slavery with her children. But the Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother” (Galatians 4:25–26).
• “You have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem” (Hebrews 12:22).
• Abraham “was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God” (Hebrews 11:10).

Earthly Jerusalem is still important in prophecy (see the Israel and End Times studies), but it is a picture of the city God Himself will bring down from heaven.

Summary

“Now we see but a dim reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face.” (1 Corinthians 13:12)